4 Comments

Now that was a long read:

"In the early thirties Trotsky also spoke of ‘Bonapartism’ in the Stalinist regime. In 1935, however, he observed that in the French Revolution Thermidor had come first and Napoleon afterwards; the order should be the same in Russia, and, as there was already a Bonaparte, Thermidor must have come and gone. In an article entitled ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor, and Bonapartism’ he amended his theory somewhat."

I expect it's Trotsky's blindness to his own similarities to Stalin and various reactionaries, plus his blind clinging to Lenin, that blinds him as well to the fact that Lenin was both his own Robespierre (given how he seized power, prosecuted the Civil War, and built his own murderous secret police) and his own Thermidorian reaction (NEP , the nationalities, etc.) and his own Directoire. Stalin was a decent analogue for Napoleon in the sense that he squeezed out the other members of Le Directoire in the end, but Trotsky was really the one for world conquest and constant expansion. (He certainly had the knack for it, given his butcherous but successful performance during the Civil War.) Stalin, monster that he was, was simply doing the heavy lifting of stabilizing the state, since constant revolution is not a viable path for a functioning or even barely functioning state.

"Trotsky, as a true doctrinaire, was insensitive to everything that was happening around him. Of course he followed events closely and commented on them, and did his best to obtain accurate information about the Soviet Union and world politics. But the essence of a doctrinaire is not that he does not read newspapers or collect facts: it consists in adhering to a system of interpretation that is impervious to empirical data, or is so nebulous that any and every fact can be used to confirm it."

The ruts Trotsky's mind ran in seemed to have had a great deal in common with the similar circular logic of people who are committed to biblical inerrancy. I can very clearly see the Soviet Union as an utterly misbegotten attempt at Utopianism undertaken by the atheistic analogue to committed fanatic Christians.

elm

hard to see anything good that came out of wwi

Expand full comment

Yes. The erasing of NEP—which was Lenin's idea—in Trotsky's mind is very curious indeed...

Expand full comment

And the issue of tolerating the nationalities AND the issue of 'socialism in one country' about all three of which Lenin managed to be on all sides of the issue.

I believe it was Volkogonov's bio:

https://www.amazon.com/Trotsky-Eternal-Revolutionary-Dmitri-Volkogonov/dp/0684822938

that made Trotsky's rhetorical weaselling pretty clear. Neither magisterial, nor fantastically written, and a also your basic hit piece, it's a book worth reading because he spends a great deal of time handing Trotsky with his own words, particularly his concealed memos and letters from when he was inside the Soviet government. (The reviews were pretty harsh, which looked to me a lot like residual clinging to Trotsky as a saintly and pure alternative to Stalin. He was obviously built up for that because Communist-leaning people needed an excuse for Stalin, so Trotsky served the same function for desperate true believers that James Comey filled for (some) forlorn Democrats back in 2017 as a counterweight to Trump.)

Mind, I haven't read it in a quarter-century, so I may be wrong as to the source of the idea, but it is a book worth reading, since it does the job of settling Trotsky's hash solidly.

It's hard to see how Trotsky would have been different than Stalin excepting his ability to retain power - Trotsky was solid on mass executions of peasants and other 'undesirables'.

elm

can't say i've ever mentioned operation paperclip at a party but then i can say i've never carried water for mass murderers of either the fascist/nazi, communist or jacksonian persuasion

Expand full comment

Yes. He provided a fictional image so that you could be Leninist but also anti-Stalinist and not have your brain explode, for a while at least...

Expand full comment